ICAT Programme

An overview of the ICAT Programme

Big Top Multimedia designed and developed the brand and website for the “Wellcome – Health Research Board Irish Clinical Academic Training (ICAT) Programme” for its launch in 2016. Since then we have created a range of designs and development for the programme ranging from their prospectus to email templates, brochureware and the setup and design of their Moodle install for eLearning.

The ICAT Programme is a unique all Ireland cross-institutional, comprehensive national programme for Clinician Scientists based at six major Irish universities and their affiliated hospital groups. Dr Karen Misstear manages the programme from her office in Dublin, with input from the executive team, and has taken a very active part in working on keeping all communications firmly on brand. Her understanding of the importance of building this brand has provided the platform for the visibility of the programme to grow very quickly. This translates into more submissions from potential candidates for the yearly intake as well as an increasing supervisor pool for the selection process of these candidates.

One challenge in developing designed materials for what was essentially a startup is how to generate imagery that represent what an organisation does without having real imagery to work from. Initially we were fortunate to have some imagery supplied by partner institutions that incorporated the like of the principle investigators and supervisors from the ICAT Programme.

However, we have been able to create a lot of ICAT specific stock through documenting key activities on film. This has now quickly generated a good stock of ‘real-world’ stock that really captures what the Programme is about.

One such event was the annual retreat that was held in Nov 2017 in Malahide. We were tasked with capturing this on film to create a short piece that would be used on social media and live on the ICAT programme website to bring to life the progress of the Programme and show what is happening and who is involved.

We also created a suite of imagery from the day as well as capturing some the entire sessions for internal use.